Reality didn't shatter like glass.
It frayed—quietly, persistently—like old thread tugged too long at the seams.
And Leo Valdez was already unraveling before the first piece fell.
He woke at 5:00 AM, again, as if the hour itself were stalking him.
The dorm room looked unchanged—poster peeling in the corner, desk cluttered with books and coded spiral-bound journals—but something felt... fundamentally unseated. Like gravity had forgotten its job. The air hung too still, like it was listening.
Leo sat up, sheets damp and twisted around his legs. The digital display on his alarm clock pulsed 5:01 AM in a slow, arrhythmic beat. Yesterday, it had frozen the same way. And the day before.
He'd changed the batteries. Twice.
He moved slowly, deliberately, as if speed might trigger something. His fingers trembled slightly—not fear, not yet. Anticipation. That gnawing sense that something waited just beyond the corner of his vision.
There, near the outlet—flicker-flick.
Two sharp blinks.
Dit-dit. Morse code for I.
His phone vibrated once on the desk. No ringtone. No contact name.
Unknown Number:You see them now, don't you? The threads?They saw you first.
Leo's breath caught. The message burned cold through his nerves. No name appeared in the thread—just that ominous "Unknown Number" that made his skin crawl.
He remembered Jessica Winters from calculus—galaxies doodled in the corners of her notebooks, black ink moons orbiting tiny stick-figure astronauts. Yesterday, her gaze had lingered on him too long. Her lips had moved in silence, forming either help or run—he couldn't be sure.
And then—he saw them.
Thin, luminescent filaments stretched across the room like strands of spider silk glinting in moonlight. From his desk lamp to his laptop. From the bookshelf to the ceiling vent. Glowing threads, barely perceptible, trembling with a sentience of their own.
They hummed—not with sound, but with sensation. He felt them in his teeth, his spine, his breath.
"Not now," he muttered to himself. "Midterm. I have a midterm."
The threads pulsed in reply. As if amused. Or disappointed.
Then came the whispers. They weren't voices, exactly—more like memories being spoken aloud in a language he didn't remember learning. Words curled around his eardrums and slid down his throat like smoke.
In the bathroom, Leo stared into the mirror.
He looked mostly the same. Mostly.
Black hair unkempt from tossing in bed. Hazel eyes rimmed with darkness, skin pale beneath fluorescent flicker. But his reflection rippled—the edges wavered like heat on asphalt. A tiny warping, a shimmer that suggested something behind the image… or within it.
The threads were here too, wrapping the mirror's edge. One reached forward, stretching across the glass like a claw.
He felt pressure. Phantom fingers curling against his throat. Not tight—yet. But present. Suggestive.
He turned away.
Another buzz.
Unknown Number:The threads are just the beginning.Watch for the Weaver in Gray.He's been watching you since the storm.
The storm. Three months ago. The blackout. Nineteen minutes of pitch-black silence while birds fell from the sky like broken wind chimes. He'd written it off as an anomaly. A power failure. A bad dream.
But something had started then.
The dorm kitchen was eerily quiet for a Thursday morning. Normally, there'd be burnt toast smells and someone complaining about the coffee maker.
Javi was there at the stove. But Leo hadn't heard him enter.
"Blueberries or chocolate chips?" Javi asked, as if nothing were wrong.
Leo blinked. Javi's face flickered. Just once. For less than a second.
Where skin had been, there was a swirling void—black and amber, shifting and screaming. Faces pressed outward from within like insects behind glass.
Then it was Javi again.
"Blueberries," Leo said automatically.
Javi flipped a pancake with practiced ease. "Did you hear about Jessica Winters?"
Leo's fork froze halfway to his mouth. "What about her?"
"Gone. Disappeared sometime last night. Campus security found her bag by the library steps." Javi's voice carried genuine concern. "That's the third student this month."
A silver thread slithered from Javi's hoodie sleeve, pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Leo's eyes tracked its movement, mesmerized and horrified.
Yesterday, he'd seen the same kind of thread coiled around Jessica's wrist in calculus.
"They'll find her," Javi said, but something in his tone suggested he didn't believe it.
Leo's reply came cold and quiet. "They won't."
Javi stared. Too long. His expression shifted as if processing an unexpected response.
"You sound pretty certain about that," he said carefully.
Leo didn't answer. Couldn't. Not without unraveling more than just his own sanity.
In the library, nothing felt safe. Not even the silence.
Books sat still on their shelves, but their titles shifted when Leo wasn't looking directly at them. "Basic Quantum Structures" became "Harvesters of Fractured Time." A thin silver thread drifted between two sections like a lazy serpent.
He tried to focus on his notes, but the words swam on the page. His handwriting from yesterday looked different somehow—more angular, as if something else had guided his pen.
"Hey. You okay?"
Leo's blood turned to ice water.
A girl stood beside his table, shadows nesting in the hollows of her eyes, dark hair falling like a curtain around her face. She looked like Jessica Winters—same height, same build, same concerned tilt of her head.
But Jessica Winters was missing.
"You're—" he began.
"Amy," she said quickly. "Amy Chen. We have Professor Martinez's American Lit together?" Her voice carried a slight tremor, like she was forcing herself to stay calm. "You looked like you were about to pass out."
Leo studied her face. The resemblance to Jessica was uncanny, but subtle differences emerged—a small scar above her left eyebrow, eyes more green than brown, a nervous habit of touching her ear.
"Sorry. Tired. Midterms."
"Tell me about it." Amy glanced around the library nervously. "Hey, you wouldn't want to walk back to the dorms together, would you? With all these disappearances..."
Leo hesitated. Something about her seemed genuine, but after this morning's messages, trust felt like a luxury he couldn't afford.
"Sure," he said finally.
They walked in silence through the quad. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows that seemed to reach for them with grasping fingers.
A woman walked by with her golden retriever—Mrs. Henderson, the groundskeeper's wife. She nodded politely as they passed. Nothing unusual there, except Leo could have sworn he'd heard someone mention she'd transferred to another campus last month.
The campus shuttle rumbled past, and through the window, Leo glimpsed Kenny behind the wheel. The same Kenny who'd driven the route for twenty years before his heart attack last semester. Before his memorial service.
The world was peeling. And the glue holding it together had started to rot.
"Do you ever feel watched?" Amy asked suddenly.
"All the time," Leo replied without hesitation.
She stopped walking. "It's more than that, isn't it? People aren't just disappearing. They're being... replaced. Or pulled away by something."
Leo turned to face her fully. "What do you know?"
Before she could answer, the world sang—a low, rumbling note like the sky had swallowed thunder. The silver threads he'd been seeing all day suddenly became visible everywhere, stretching between buildings, wrapping around lampposts, connecting every living thing in a vast, pulsing web.
And at the center of it all, standing at the mouth of the narrow alley between the library and student center, was a man in gray.
He stood perfectly still, coat smooth as liquid mercury, silver hair that didn't shine but seemed to drink light. His smile was a scalpel's edge. His eyes held depth like cliff edges: beautiful, awful, hungry.
His shadow writhed independent of his body, threads of darkness twitching like dying things.
Reality bent around him like metal near a magnet. The air thickened. Buildings leaned inward like worshippers bowing before an altar.
Amy screamed.
The thread around her wrist—when had it appeared?—tightened like a noose.
"NO—" Leo lunged forward, but she was already being dragged backward, her scream cutting off as darkness swallowed her whole. As if she'd never existed at all.
Silence. A breathless, ringing emptiness.
Only a single frayed thread remained, dangling in the air where she'd stood. It sparked in dim pulses—morse code, maybe. A goodbye. Or a warning.
The man in gray was gone. But Leo could still feel his smile like a brand against his skin.
Another buzz.
Unknown Number:Welcome to the unraveling, Leo Valdez.Try not to scream. It only encourages them.
Leo closed his eyes, then opened them again.
The quad looked normal. Students walked past, chatting about assignments and weekend plans. No one seemed to notice that Amy Chen had just been erased from existence.
No one except Leo.
This wasn't madness.
It wasn't a dream.
The monsters were real.
And now that he'd seen them, they would never let him look away again.